Is email running your life?

It’s been recommended that you don’t check your email first thing in the morning. The idea is that you become more productive when you’re not distracted by small tasks that take up time and keep you from more important things on your to-do list.

For some people, this may be unrealistic. People may be waiting on assignments or answers from you so that they can do their work. Clients want information. And yet you probably can’t argue that you do check your email way too often, and it does become a distraction from your real work.

Is there a balance between checking email and productivity?

You have to make a system that works for your constraints. Here are some tips to get you started.

Check your email only at certain times of the day. Plan certain times of the day to answer and respond. Make sure you turn off your alerts so that you’re not tempted to check. Use your judgment based on the policies where you work.

When you’re reading emails, if you can answer it in less than two minutes, take care of it. For those emails that will take more time, put them in a folder marked “to-do.”

Set up folders for emails that you need to save. After you answer an email, file it or delete it. Get it out of your inbox.

Even better than you sorting your emails into folders is setting up rules for your email. Make your software work for you.

If you get newsletters and blog updates, consider routing them to another email.

Make certain times where you limit the time you spend on email. For example, right before lunch, take ten minutes and only answer the most important ones. Schedule a time for responding to those other emails so they don’t get lost.

Even if you have to check your email every half-hour, you will get two longer periods of around twenty minutes of focused productive time every hour. Once you see how valuable that time is, you can make an argument for checking your email every hour. Focus on what’s important, and think of email as an answering machine that you periodically check, as it was meant to be.

Dawn Brotherton is a staff writer at The American Genius, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma. Before earning her degree, she spent over 20 years homeschooling her two daughters, who are now out changing the world. She lives in Oklahoma and loves to golf. She hopes to publish a novel in the future.

The federal investigation into the Hawaii civil defense snafu earlier this month revealed that there were serious errors in how the training exercise was conducted between two shifts and in the ongoing performance concerns of the employee directly responsible for sending out the alert.

For 38 minutes, citizens and visitors in the Hawaiian Islands cowered in fear, alerted to take immediate shelter by messages that were received on cellphones and broadcast on TV stations across the state. While officials attempted to calm the populace by taking to Twitter immediately to quell the concerns, many people were not—understandably—taking to tweeting what may have been their last thoughts, and thus were not informed until a follow up message was broadcast to cellphones nearly 40 minutes later.

The Federal Communications Commission, which conducted the federal portion of the investigation into the incident, put partial blame on a lack of clarity about the drill between the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency supervisors of the evening and the morning shifts and a subsequent lack of supervision.

The night-shift supervisor wanted to test the preparedness of the morning-shift workers with an unannounced drill, according to the FCC report. While the day-shift supervisor was allegedly aware that the drill was to take place, he thought that it was to test the night-shift personnel, not the morning crew. As such, he was not prepared to oversee the drill.

The test, which followed normal protocols, involved the night-shift supervisor playing a prerecorded message to emergency personnel warning them that a threat was imminent. The recording, which was simulating real notification from the U.S. Pacific Command, did include the words “Exercise, exercise, exercise,” according to the FCC report, but it also stated “This is not a drill” – which is what workers would expect to hear in a real warning for an active missile alert.

Adding to the confusion was that the worker who was responsible for transmitting the alert as an active emergency heard the language that reflected that it was not a drill, but did not hear the “exercise” language in the tape playback. The employee, believing that it was an actual alert, rather than a drill, responded affirmatively to a prompt asking “Are you sure that you want to send this Alert?”, said the FCC. He was, according to both the FCC and the state investigation into the incident, the only employee to believe that it was an actual alert, and the only worker not to hear the “exercise” portion of the drill.

Adding to the confusion was the revelation by Hawaii state officials on Tuesday that the employee in question had a troubled work history stretching back over the past decade.

The state investigation revealed that the employee had been counseled and corrected for poor performance over the previous 10 years, including that, on at least two occasions, the employee also “confused real life events and drills.” While other members of the employee’s team were reportedly uncomfortable with him and his work for some time, this mistake proved to be the final action of his career with the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, as he was terminated last week, pending appeal.

Vern T. Miyagi, administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, resigned Tuesday morning as the investigation results were released and “has taken full responsibility” for the incident, according to Major General Joe Logan, the state adjutant general, who oversees the agency.

Target launches same day delivery and we’re too happy

If a retailer is going to keep up with the likes of Amazon and Walmart these days, they’ve got to be able to offer superfast delivery. Retail giant Target is getting in the game, with pilot programs beginning tests of same-day delivery in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Tampa and parts of South Florida starting this month.

The delivery service is made possible through a collaboration with online grocery delivery service Shipt, which Target purchased for $550 million back in December. But with Target same-day delivery, you can order more than just groceries. Your items are hand selected by a human being shopping within your nearest Target store, so you can purchase items from any department.

The deliveries themselves are free, but that’s after you buy a membership. For one month, a membership costs $14, or $99 a year, saving you $69 when you spring for the yearlong membership. And that’s for orders over $35 – if you just need a package of toilet paper or a frozen pizza, you’ll have to pay a $7 delivery charge. There’s another catch: prices on same-delivery items could differ from the price you’d get in the store.

But how do you know your personal shopper will pick the perfectly ripe avocado, or the right shade of eyeshadow? The app allows you to “connect with your shopper and get live updates from the aisles,” so that you can “inspect every single item.” Shoppers will “even learn your pickiest produce preferences – to make sure everything we deliver is just the thing you like.” Target will hire 100,000 shoppers to help fulfill online orders.

Once your personal shopper has assembled your order, you’ll receive it on your doorstep the same day, sometimes in as little as one hour.

If this test program goes well, Target will expand the service to other stores. They’re already planning to launch same-day delivery from stores in Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina starting next week.

Old Navy has fired three employees at a West Des Moines store after James Conley III, a 29-year-old black man, posted a video showing evidence that he was racially profiled while shopping.

The video went viral, causing the Old Navy location to shut down for one day, and for the corporate headquarters to launch an investigation. A few days later, three employees were terminated.

Conley, who calls himself a frequent shopper who came to Old Navy almost weekly, says that he was accused by employees of stealing the jacket that he came into the store wearing – an Old Navy jacket he had received for Christmas.

An employee rescanned Conley’s jacket to verified it had been paid for. Conley asked a manager to review the security footage to prove that he was wearing the jacket when he arrived. Although the security footage cleared Conley, the manager did not show their face again, and Conley did not receive an apology.

“Don’t ever come to Old Navy, ‘cause they’ll stereotype you if you’re black,” he says in the video.

Old Navy posted an apology on Facebook, saying that the “situation was a violation of our policies and values,” and that the company “is committed to ensuring that our stores are an environment where everyone feels welcome.” Old Navy also used this post to announce that three employees had been fired as a result of the incident.

Conley says that at first he thought he would “remain silent,” but decided to post the video he’d taken, saying that anybody “should be able to go shopping without being racially profiled.” He has hired an attorney and may seek monetary damages. Unfortunately, such incidents of racial profiling are all too common, but in this case, Conley has used social media and his legal rights to take a stand.

In a press conference at the attorney general’s office, Conley described the situation as “really embarrassing,” and “nothing I want anyone to go through, ever.”